by Fred Kaplan
A disciplined workaholic, even during the winter of his father’s death Gore kept at various writing projects, the most time-consuming a new novel, with the tentative title Two Sisters of Ephesus, which he worked on in Rome and Klosters. In spring 1969, not long after his father’s death, Gore went alone to Amalfi, to stay in the same hotel at which he and Tennessee had stayed in 1948, in order to work, “for old times’ sake,” on the screenplay of Seven Descents. When he first saw it, he thought it “very bad,” he wrote in Two Sisters, “but then, after some study, found parts were marvelous, and laughed aloud, hearing, as I read, the wry cadence of his voice, heard our old laughter in the courtyard of the hotel … and marveled to myself that so many years later I would be adapting him in a place we had once stayed before time had played its usual jokes, made him a bit mad and, for me at least, remote, made me … the same.” Seven Descents, distributed eventually as The Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots, with Sidney Lumet directing and producing for Warner Brothers and Seven Arts, Gore undertook partly for money, mostly as a sentimental tribute to his friend. Williams hoped that Gore’s association with the film would be mutually beneficial, as his adaptation of Suddenly, Last Summer had been. In the end the film had little success. It did, though, bring them together again, for a short time bridging a distance that Gore attributed to Tennessee’s increasingly erratic behavior. For much of the sixties the playwright had struggled with failure, depression, and flight. Drugs and liquor, in semidevastating combinations and degrees, had frequently incapacitated him. Gore had seen him occasionally in New York and Key West, but the intensity of engagement, the delight in each other’s company that had previously characterized their friendship was mostly gone. Maria Britneva, now always good-humoredly referred to as “The Lady St. Just,” kept them in touch by her ministrations to both. When she went to Rome, as she often did, she stayed at Via Di Torre Argentina. In Key West she stayed with Tennessee. Oliver Evans, an American professor of English, tall, red-faced, loud-voiced, whom Tennessee had introduced to Gore in New Orleans in the late 1940s, provided another ongoing link. Gore, who saw him off and on in New York, liked him. “Evans was wildly funny. When he was drinking, his nose would get very red and start to bob up and down. His nose had a life of its own. And you knew as it got worse and worse that his temper was going to explode on you. Tantrums.” A good friend of Paul Bowles’s, Evans made the Tangiers/European circuit regularly and, with Tennessee as companion, had begun to take regular sex holidays in Bangkok. When Tennessee visited Gore in Rome in mid-July 1970, he had read Gore’s comment in Two Sisters on his remoteness. “First of all,” he wrote to Gore afterward, “it was wonderful to renew your acquaintance and I don’t believe that you find me still remote, perhaps excessively near but not remote. … I thought the evening went delightfully. AND regardless of your crotchety attitude toward me, mine toward you is fixed as a star, not falling. When nervous you rattle like a window in a bombardment, but that isn’t often and most of the time you are one of the coolest and effortlessly witty people I’ve known—and your writing gets sharper with the years and you are steadily more convincing in the part of a grand seigneur.”
It was a sweet, conciliatory letter, and the next time Williams was in Rome, they spent some “lovely evenings” together. “Tenn. was in town,” Gore wrote to Paul Bowles, “drinking and pill-taking and mad, sad if not dangerous to know—‘Ah must leave as there is Coo dee Tah of the right and it is not safe here.’” In London in 1974 Gore delighted in Williams’s comment to Claire Bloom, rehearsing for a London revival of Streetcar, in which she felt she gave the best performance of her life. She asked Williams what happens to Blanche afterward. “No actress has ever asked me that question.” He sat “back in his chair, narrowed his eyes…. ‘She will enjoy her time in the bin. She will seduce one or two of the more comely young doctors. Then she will be let free to open an attractive boutique in the French Quarter.’ ‘She wins?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ said the Bird. ‘Blanche wins.’” Williams was, though, not doing very much winning himself. Gore admired his effortlessly laconic intelligence, his intuitive humor, his funny though increasingly frustrating incoherence. But the drift soon resumed, the friendship reattenuated by distance and Williams’s physical and emotional decline, their interchanges slightly exacerbated by Tennessee’s awareness that the relative demand for their work as writers was in the process of being reversed. He had not had for some time and would never have again a theatrical success. By the early 1970s he could hardly find any venue for his new plays, let alone a Broadway production. Though Gore was sour about the theater since the failure of Weekend and his ongoing failure to get Drawing Room Comedy produced, it was a secondary interest. His mind and imagination were mostly on fiction and occasional essays, the next volume of which, Homage to Daniel Shays: Collected Essays, 1952–1972, was to establish Vidal as the premier general-audience essayist of the second half of the twentieth century on literary, social, and political topics. His three novels since returning to fiction had been bestsellers. Julian had been a great critical success. Though Myra had had a mixed reception, much of the hostility based on misunderstanding or narrow moralism, many perceptive readers, among them Richard Poirier, Fred Dupee, and Christopher Isherwood, thought it a masterpiece. At the age of forty-five, vigorous, healthy, disciplined, still immensely ambitious, Vidal had much expected of him. To most observers Williams’s best work, and much of his life, seemed behind him.
The person to whom The City and the Pillar had been dedicated, who had always been a part of Gore’s consciousness, like a friendly ghost whose real life had been lost long ago, had to have been on Gore’s mind when he created in 1970 the screenplay Jim Now, based on the 1948 novel. Apparently a perfunctory simplification of City’s plot, it was not something to which he devoted either much passion or time. It had come up as something he might do, and between more passionate commitments he tried his hand at it, partly because it had been suggested that he himself might direct it. Arrangements to make a low-budget version in Rome directed by Franco Rossellini fell through. Financing was difficult to arrange, and Gore suspected that Rossellini would find a way to profit from the venture more than anyone else, perhaps by raising money for a film he had little or no intention of making. By mid-1972 most of the Hollywood studios had declined the script, some because of the subject matter. Jimmie Trimble was becoming, though, even more of a presence than he had been, partly because, as Gore now approached his late forties, retrospective evocation and revivifying mythmaking had a greater attraction than they had had earlier. “Death, summer, youth—this triad contrives to haunt me every day of my life,” he wrote in Two Sisters, “for it was in summer that my generation left school for war, and several dozen that one knew (but strictly did not love, except perhaps for one) were killed, and so never lived to know what I have known … and someone hardly remembered, a youth … so abruptly translated from vivid, well-loved (if briefly) flesh to a few scraps of bone and cartilage scattered among the volcanic rocks of Iwo Jima. So much was cruelly lost and one still mourns the past, particularly in darkened movie houses, weeping at bad films, or getting drunk alone while watching the Late Show on television as our summer’s war is again refought and one sees sometimes what looks to be a familiar face in the battle scenes—is it Jimmie?” Always alive in his deepest consciousness, his St. Albans schoolboy friend now became more sentiently vivid. When the next year Gore had one of his rare experiences with a hallucinogenic drug, suddenly “Jimmie Trimble arrived in my bed wearing blue pajamas…. And I could actually feel his body.” Now, with Gore more than halfway through his own life, the abrupt termination of Jimmie’s seemed appositely remembered and emotionally recharged, increasingly emblematic of all that had been lost, for those who had survived the war as well as those who had not. As Gore looked into the mirror, the noticeable changes from the youthful Apollonianism he had been so long used to were a fretful reminder of the greater changes to come. Being middle-aged seemed a slightly cruel joke. Gr
owing old had no attractions. His father’s death was a wrenchingly personal dramatization of the inevitable. “Recently,” he wrote in Two Sisters, “I dreamed of my father who died last winter. He was seated in some sort of a funicular car moving slowly opposite to me. As we came abreast of one another, I saw with dull horror that he was dead and where his eyes should have been there were bright flames. Ultimate fate of watery creatures in a fiery universe.”
Though Two Sisters, A Novel in the Form of a Memoir, A Memoir in the Form of a Novel, had no place for Jimmie as a character, his singular evocation consorts effectively with the novel’s underlying emphasis on doubling and twins. The complicated narrative has doubling, or at least dual temporalities, built into its structure just as it has a brother/sister pair of twins and two twinlike but not actual twin sisters as a central part of a screenplay within the narrative. The overall narrator who exists “NOW” is a slightly fictionalized version of the author, as is the GV of “THEN,” whom we see mostly through the eyes of Eric Van Damm (who looks physically much like Jimmie Trimble), with whom GV “THEN” was in love as he was also in love with Eric’s twin sister, Erica, and with whom he thinks (incorrectly, it turns out) he has fathered a child. The overall frame of the novel in the present of its beginning and end brings an Anaïs Nin—like character named Marietta Donegal to Rome to ask the fictionalized version of Gore Vidal if he will read and then help her to sell to Hollywood a screenplay that Eric wrote in 1948. Marietta, who had lived with GV in Paris for three months in 1948 and also had an affair with Eric, hopes to make a great deal of money from it. Actually, as the author and the reader soon discover, the screenplay, Two Sisters from Ephesus, which composes the middle third of the novel, is totally unsuitable for commercial production. Set in Greece in 356 B.C., it exists as a thematic analogue to the rest of the novel, a dramatization of the love/hate rivalry between two sisters that focuses on power, love, and art, represented by the sisters’ half-brother, Herostratus, an ambitious, poetic fire-creator and -destroyer whose involvement with his sisters parallels GV’s with Eric and Erica. The novel’s two sisters from Ephesus purposely suggest Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and Lee Bouvier Radziwill, a fascination with the Kennedy-Bouvier world that Louis Auchincloss, after he read Two Sisters, fervently hoped Gore had finally gotten out of his system. After Washington, D.C. and now Two Sisters, as well as his essays on the Kennedys, it seemed to Louis obsessively counterproductive. The Kennedy world, though, plays only a minor role in Two Sisters, and probably the general reader did not catch the allusions at all, though the reviewers and the literary/social gossip chamber certainly did. The novel as a whole is not about living people, except for the author himself, whose experiment with mixing fiction and nonfiction, made fashionable by his contemporaries, Mailer and Capote, had to do with his own effort to stretch his imaginative wings by trying something different, to explore his own artistic sources, and to try working through and celebrating the mirrorlike doublings of art and life.
Two Sisters was neither a critical nor a commercial success, the first of his novels since the success of Julian not to make the bestseller list. Little, Brown was less disappointed than the author, though both had seen the handwriting on the wall from the earliest stages of the book’s production. In fact, Little, Brown simply discounted its losses, so Vidal surmised, as an inevitable cost of sustaining a desirable author on its list, and looked forward to a new contract with Vidal that would keep them together for future books. It was not aware that Jason Epstein had renewed his solicitations to tempt Gore to become his author at Random House, though Gore had not yet decided what to do. Two Sisters had its admirers, or at least fair attention from reviewers, many of whom thought it bold, experimental, effective in parts, but not sufficiently interesting or successful overall. The difficulty of relating the full-length screenplay embedded in the partly fictional, partly autobiographical narrative to the novel as a whole baffled many.
One of the art-life doubles of Two Sisters soon showed up in Europe, making her appearance in both dimensions. In Two Sisters, Anaïs Nin, as Marietta Donegal, is Vidal’s slightly parodic version of the Anaïs he had known since 1945. In the early 1960s, like Marietta, she had tried to persuade him to produce, by which she meant finance, a script she had co-authored for which she had a French director who she hoped would make movies of all her novels. Gore had declined to help. Now, in mid-1970, she had another request to make. Still searching for literary vindication, she had begun in 1966 to publish edited versions of her diaries, the materials carefully selected to be as favorable to herself as possible. The three volumes that had appeared had helped reawaken and create an interest in her work. She had begun to become a cult figure of sorts. Her enthusiasts found her romantic subjectivity and her preoccupation with feminine sexuality compelling if not liberating. For the first time she had an audience, for her diaries more than for her fiction, especially in Europe. In Rome in 1970, soon after the publication of Two Sisters, Gore received a telegram from Anaïs. She needed his permission to include in volume four, covering the years 1944–47 and scheduled to appear in mid-1971, what she had written about him. At the bar of the familiar Pont Royal Hôtel in Paris, after examining the text she provided, he gave his permission to include everything except a few lines that mentioned a third party. Anaïs, who seemed as beautiful as ever, gave him a “hard look.” She had been told that Marietta Donegal had been based on her. Was that true? “‘I don’t read that sort of book—but I was told it was a hideous caricature.” She seemed to accept Gore’s explanation that the character’s “philosophy,” not her personality or person, was loosely based on hers. No reader, though, could have mistaken the numerous ways in which Marietta Donegal resembled Gore’s view of Anaïs, and many reviewers had highlighted the identification. The rest of the portrait, he told her, was fiction. “She took that well enough. She was aware that we no longer felt the same way about things. ‘Anyway, you said—I was told—that I wrote well.’” If he had actually said that, he took it back in a review of volume four, “Taking a Grand Tour of Anaïs Nin’s High Bohemia,” that he published in the Los Angeles Times in September 1971, an act of distancing probably intended to break forever whatever bond remained between them. The indirect hostility that had resulted in Marietta Donegal now became explicit, though, as often the case with Gore, it was accompanied by sound judgment and some retrospective tenderness. The diaries, he wrote, had promised that one day Anaïs would be established “as a great sensibility. Now here they are, and I am not so sure…. Not only does she write an inflated, oracular prose, but she is never able to get outside her characters” and unable to reveal their interiors. “Anaïs is dealing with actual people. Yet I would not recognize any of them (including myself) had she not carefully labeled each specimen…. I do not recognize Anaïs—or myself—in these bitter pages. Yet when I think of her and the splendid times we had so many years ago, I find myself smiling, recalling with pleasure her soft voice, her French accent, and the way she always said ‘yatch’ instead of ‘yacht.’ That makes up for a lot.” Furious, Anaïs felt that it ended everything, of which, anyway, there was little left. They never saw or spoke to each other again.
Another old friend, Paul Bowles, Gore had genuine affection for and no desire for distance from. He was happy to let their shared past stand. Bowles’s differentness he respected, though it helped keep their meetings infrequent. At Christmas 1969 he and Howard, soon after a two-week trip to India—Gore’s first to Asia or the Far East—went to Morocco, where they spent three days in Tangier and saw Bowles for dinner each night. Jane, who had been seriously ill for more than a decade and who was to have only three years more of life, was a long-term patient in a hospital in Spain. Bowles, now at work on his autobiography, had been spending part of each year in California, where Oliver Evans, teaching there himself, had arranged a position for him at California State University at Northridge. The rest of the time Bowles spent in Morocco, where his life had become a ritualized wor
k schedule balanced by his love of North Africa and his addiction to kif. The modest teaching salary far exceeded what he earned as a writer. “I had dinner with him,” Gore recalled, “the day before he went over to Northridge for his first class. He said, ‘What should I teach?’ I said, ‘How do I know? I’ve never taught.’ He said, ‘Well, I think I’m going to teach me. What do you think?’ ‘Well, at least you know the subject.’ And he taught himself. That’s about all they ever got out of him. Bowles, Bowles, Bowles. He was probably a lot better subject than the ones they wanted him to teach.” At Paul’s urging, Gore, who never smoked cigarettes and found that he could not inhale, tried the mild narcotic again and disliked it as much as ever. They still enjoyed one another’s company, their differences mostly entertaining, a mutually playful respect that expressed itself, among other ways, in the nicknames they used in their correspondence by reversing the letters of their names. Gore was “Erog,” Paul “Luap.” Bowles, who immediately before Gore’s arrival had read the Buckley—Vidal Esquire articles, enjoyed being brought up to date, something difficult to be in isolated Morocco. When a young American poet and Bowles admirer, Dan Halpern, came by, Vidal submitted to a lengthy interview for Antaeus, a magazine that Halpern, encouraged by Bowles, was about to start. The names of friends from their New York world of the 1940s and ’50s came up in their dinnertime conversations. The next summer, when Gore found a blank piece of “John Treville Latouche” stationery, which gave him a start, he used it to write a note to Bowles, who thought for a moment that he was being written to by a ghost. With Howard they took a drive to Bowles’s favorite point from which to view the Mediterranean, Gibraltar visible to the north. Standing there, Bowles remarked that he felt he was at the center of the world. In North Africa, Vidal felt displaced, off-center. His omphalos was at Delphi.